"Apocalypse Now" Reconsidered

It doesn't make total sense, and I think Coppola knows it.

All of us can recall moments from our distant past that aren’t solid enough as memories to be fully trusted. Maybe we’ve unconsciously embellished them over time, so we’re not accurately envisioning what happened. Or we may vaguely remember events that we’ve heard about that didn’t involve us, but we think we experienced them firsthand, like that time those two kids got into a wild fight in the lunchroom in high school.

Everybody talked about it so much; years later, you began to think you were actually there.

I have a really unique one, though, as far as movies go—I saw what I thought I saw, but I grew convinced after a few years that I hadn’t actually seen it! Incredibly enough, it pertained to my first-ever viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s much-debated Apocalypse Now.

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I was already way into movies by the time I hit high school, so I was well aware that Coppola and his crew had been trapped in a horrible, money-sucking production vortex out in the Philippines while shooting a Vietnam War picture called Apocalypse Now, and that critics who had already seen the movie were somewhat at odds over it.

I had been telling my buddies all about the ordeal, too. So, anxious to see for ourselves, we piled into a late-model Chrysler and made a beeline for the Madison Theater in Huntsville, AL, the night the movie opened nationwide. A quick Internet search tells me this would have been on August 15, 1979.

Hoping to get prime seats, we managed to slip into the theater while we assumed the credits would be rolling at the end of the previous showing—something we had never done before. Little did we know we would be flattened by what we were seeing and hearing. Rather than a mere roll call of technicians’ names and maybe some music playing in the background, we were transfixed by an acid-tinged rendering of some kind of jungle compound bursting into flames.

This was seven or eight solid minutes of hallucinatory footage—all searing oranges, yellows, and reds—accompanied by a troubled angelic chorus, booming tribal drums, and occasional squalls of Jimi Hendrix-style electric guitar feedback. I sat there with my jaw hanging open, completely enveloped by whatever the hell it was I was seeing.

By the time this all ended and faded to black, I felt like I had already watched a visionary piece of filmmaking. Then, after a couple of trailers for upcoming pictures that seemed even more anemic than usual, given the circumstances, I watched a soon-to-be legendary movie called Apocalypse Now for the first time.

Imagine being 16 years old and having no clue whatsoever that the movie was going to be psychedelically tinged, then sitting in a darkened auditorium with Coppola’s images exploding in front of you and Walter Murch’s sound design rolling around in a groundbreaking swirl of precision Dolby overload.

That viewing remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater and one of the high points of my teenage existence. It was a very memorable cinematic experience.

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Be that as it may…

I know a lot of people will view what follows as heresy, but I’m not trying to tell them what they think. I’m telling them what I think…

Forty-five years later, I can see a lot of flaws in Apocalypse Now, most of them having to do with a script that seems glued together with ambitious spit and a dream. It doesn’t work for me as a narrative, and believe me, I’ve tried many times over the years to convince myself that it does.

I want it all to work. I really do.

I can certainly understand what Coppola is getting at. He’s taking us upriver into Conrad’s ol’ heart of darkness, the one that secretly beats in all of us and was pounding especially hard in the chests of those poor souls who were caught in the insane, pointless meat grinder of the Vietnam War.

That much is obvious. The trouble for me, though, is that Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard is so passive most of the time, we never feel like we’re entering his dark heart. He sure tries to convince us we are, though, via Michael Herr’s overly mannered hipster narration.

Willard mainly just rides around on a boat, then gets out of the boat and watches the next staggering set piece of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, right along with the rest of the audience.

Think about it. There he is, staring numbly at crazy-ass Col. Kilgore and his surfing obsession. Then he’s staring numbly at all the G.I.s going nuts over the gyrating Playmates. Then he’s staring numbly at the guy who doesn’t know who’s in charge at Do Lung Bridge.

Then he gets back on the boat and tells us how all of this is making him feel. You’d have no idea whatsoever if he didn’t directly tell you. He never seems any different than he did when he first climbed onboard. In fact, he largely seems pretty chill on the boat!

Hell, until Willard finally gets around to killing him, he even stares numbly at Kurtz!

That drunken scene at the beginning of the picture, where Willard dances around in his briefs, screams in existential anguish, and rubs his own blood all over his face when he gouges his hand, is where the character should have ended up! He’s already psychologically fried in the first scene, then he seems to grow calmer and more analytical about the mess he’s in as the movie proceeds.

Coppola got it backwards! If he had done this with The Godfather, Al Pacino would have blown somebody’s brains out at the wedding reception and started dating Diane Keaton at the end of the movie.

Then there’s Marlon Brando sitting there like Buddha doing his autodidactic blowhard routine, which is hardly enough to sew up the loose threads of a film grappling with the Big Questions of Existence. Hell, I’ve seen Brando do the same thing on The Dick Cavett Show! And don’t even get me started on glassy-eyed Dennis Hopper obviously making it up as he goes along.

Still, there’s the opening napalm dream with the slo-mo sound of helicopter rotors chopping the air, the horrifying yet exhilarating “Ride of the Valkyries” attack on the village (arguably the greatest action sequence ever filmed), and Willard rising out of the water in camouflage face paint to assassinate Kurtz.

All of these things work in a big way. They’re genuinely fantastic visions, incredible pieces of filmmaking.

It’s unfortunate Coppola couldn’t convey this encroaching heaviness through his main character, rather than following a semi-mute guy who mostly reads dossiers and looks askance at people while they go nuts out in the jungle.

Maybe it’s Sheen; I don’t know. Imagine how much more powerful things would have been with Steve McQueen—who looked intense while not doing much of anything for a living—watching all that crazy shit unfold. Coppola very much wanted to cast McQueen, you know, but the actor turned him down.

You can even see a despairing Coppola saying he doesn’t think he’s achieving what he set out to do with Apocalypse Now in his wife Eleanor’s fascinating documentary about the making of the picture, Hearts of Darkness. But I guess people just want to think, “Oh, that Francis. He’s getting all worked up, and the movie turned out perfectly.”

Am I really wrong to agree with Coppola himself?

Oh, well. There's a moment in that Beatles Anthology documentary where Paul McCartney talks about the rather commonly voiced opinion that the “White Album” would have been a lot stronger had it been honed down to a single record instead of being released as a messy two-record set containing several rather silly, dispensable tracks. McCartney shrugs off this idea, saying, "Okay." Maybe. “But come on! It’s the bloody Beatles’ White Album!

Well, Apocalypse Now could be a more solid piece of work, too. But come on—it's bloody Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! That’s what it is, and that’s how it will forever stand.

That’ll have to be good enough for me. And probably for Coppola, too, now that he’s done re-editing and re-releasing a new “final version” every ten or so years.

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Getting back to that credit sequence. I must have watched Apocalypse Now fifteen or twenty times in the theater, on videotape, and on broadcast television after that mind-blowing initial viewing, and not once did it close with the phantasmagorical carpet bombing I remembered so vividly.

When I worked behind the counter at the legendary East Village movie geek pitstop Kim’s Video in the early Nineties—one of my co-workers was a weaselly little NYU film student named Todd Phillips, who I never trusted—I asked just about every knowledgeable customer I talked to if he or she had ever seen what I saw at the end of Apocalypse Now.

They all looked at me like I was nuts.

Apocalypse Now, they’d say, ends with vague jungle music and credits appearing and disappearing down in the corner of a black screen, or sometimes it’s just a black screen with music, but no credits at all. It certainly isn’t anything to talk about.

Still, whenever I had a chance to watch the picture in a different format, I’d hold my breath at the end, hoping to re-experience that magic night from 1979.

But all I got was credits.

There came a point where I really felt I had imagined it. Maybe I created the sequence in my subconscious because of the initial impact of the movie as a whole. It didn’t seem likely, but that was the only answer I had for myself.

Then the gods smiled on Paul Tatara.

In 1999, Paramount released a remastered, widescreen DVD of Apocalypse Now that included a bonus segment called “Destruction of Kurtz Compound!” I just about fainted when I saw it listed in the credits on the back of the box.

Take a look.

If you wanted to, you could even watch this six minutes of footage on the DVD with audio commentary from Coppola himself!

In that commentary, Coppola says he wanted the end of the film to have no credits at all, with audiences being handed booklets containing the production information. He actually did this for the initial 70mm prints that were shown only in special theaters. But when it came time to release Apocalypse Now nationwide in the more conventional 35mm format, printing and handing out booklets was no longer feasible.

When he finished filming the picture, Coppola was obligated to get rid of the Kurtz compound that his production team built in the jungle in the Philippines, so he came up with the idea of blowing the whole thing to kingdom come while filming it with infrared film. He rightly figured it would look amazing, and he thought he might be able to utilize the footage somehow during the editing process.

So he chose to create a credit sequence for the 35mm prints using the footage. But he says his intent for the end of the movie was to have Willard reach a point of enlightenment about the futility of war, then choose to walk away from it, leading his young cohort Lance by the hand toward a more hopeful, non-violent future.

Now, if that’s what any of you actually sense is going on at the end of Apocalypse Now, you’re way ahead of me.

As far as I can tell, Willard and Lance are just getting out of there now that Kurtz is dead. Besides, “onward toward pacifism” would be an awfully interesting conclusion for Willard to reach moments after putting on war paint and hacking a man to death with a machete.

Anyway, Coppola didn’t think it would be appropriate for Willard to call in an airstrike and kill the people in Kurtz’s compound if that’s where his head was supposed to be at, but it somehow didn’t occur to Coppola that the audience would think that’s exactly what they were seeing when, via the infrared footage, bombs are dropped and the compound explodes at fifteen different angles!

Realizing he just created more confusion with the infrared footage, which was only supposed to be a fantasy or a dream or something—again, ya got me—he quickly withdrew the 35mm prints, removed the stunning imagery, and replaced it with a black screen and conventional credits.

That’s how my friends and I managed to be bowled over by it on opening night, only to have the whole thing evaporate like it never existed for the next twenty years!

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The thing I learned from Apocalypse Now as a screenwriter is to always have a specific ending in mind when you start writing, something you can aim at that will keep you focused while you invent your characters and narrative. In fact, I used to tell this to a screenwriting class I guest-lectured for a few times at the New School, and I always specified Apocalypse Now’s problems when I did it.

If you don’t have a target when you’re writing—and you see Coppola in Hearts of Darkness racking his brain for a big ending during filming—you may wind up with a lot of great ideas and exciting or interesting scenes. But you can wander around so much the audience won’t know exactly what you’re trying to say when you’re done.

Does this mean Francis Ford Coppola, at the top of his game, isn’t a genius?

No. It does not. He’s bloody Francis Ford Coppola! This guy directed a handful of the most brilliantly conceived and constructed films in motion picture history. He just didn’t completely pull it off with the otherwise extraordinary Apocalypse Now.

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I’ve yet to see Megalopolis, but take note of its many negative reviews. How often are critics saying, “A lot of this looks incredible, and it’s really ambitious, but it doesn’t make any sense!”

Old habits die hard, I guess.